On the computation of finite bottom-quark mass effects in Higgs boson production

TL;DR

This paper derives analytic formulas for bottom-quark mass effects in Higgs production via gluon fusion at NLO, using a novel small-mass expansion method that facilitates higher-order calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a new expansion technique for master integrals in small bottom-mass, enhancing the precision of Higgs production cross-section computations involving bottom-quark effects.

Findings

Analytic results for top-bottom interference at NLO in QCD.

A generalizable small-mass expansion algorithm for master integrals.

Framework for NNLO bottom-quark mass effect calculations.

Abstract

We present analytic results for the partonic cross-sections contributing to the top-bottom interference in Higgs production via gluon fusion at hadron colliders at NLO accuracy in QCD. We develop a method of expansion in small bottom-mass for master integrals and combine it with the usual infinite top-mass effective theory. Our method of expansion admits a simple algorithmic description and can be easily generalized to any small parameter. These results for the integrated cross-sections will be needed in the computation of the renormalization counter-terms entering the computation of finite bottom-quark mass effects at NNLO.